to the compact between the governed and governing can avoid being cheated out of the best rights inherent in human nature, as an experience the world has seen almost enough of has proved.  We are in trouble just now, on account of a neglected hereditary melanosis, as Monsieur Trousseau might call it.  When we recover from the social and political convulsion it has produced, and eliminate the materies morbi,—­and both these events are only matters of time,—­perhaps we shall have leisure to breed our own milliners.  If not, there will probably be refugees enough from the Old World, who have learned the fashions in courts, and will be glad to turn their knowledge to a profitable use for the benefit of their republican patronesses in New York and Boston.

We have run away from our subject farther than we intended at starting; but an essay on legs could hardly avoid the rambling tendency which naturally belongs to these organs.

* * * * *

PAUL BLECKER.

PART I.

  “Which serves life’s purpose best,
  To enjoy or to renounce?”

A thorough American, who comprehends what America has to do, and means to help on with it, ought to choose to be born in New England, for the vitalized brain, finely-chorded nerves, steely self-control,—­then to go West, for more live, muscular passion, succulent manhood, naked-handed grip of his work.  But when he wants to die, by all means let him hunt out a town in the valley of Pennsylvania or Virginia:  Nature and man there are so ineffably self-contained, content with that which is, shut in from the outer surge, putting forth their little peculiarities, as tranquil and glad to be alive as if they were pulseless sea-anemones, and after a while going back to the Being whence they came, just as tranquil and glad to be dead.

Paul Blecker had some such fancy as this, that last evening before the regiment of which he was surgeon started for Harper’s Ferry, while he and the Captain were coming from camp by the hill-road into the village (or burgh:  there are no Villages in Pennsylvania).  Nothing was lost on Blecker; his wide, nervous eyes took all in:  the age and complacent quiet of this nook of the world, the full-blooded Nature asleep in the yellow June sunset; why! she had been asleep there since the beginning, he knew.  The very Indians in these hills must have been a fishing, drowsy crew; their names and graves yet dreamily haunted the farms and creek-shores.  The Covenanters who came after them never had roused themselves enough to shake them off.  Covenanters:  the Doctor began joking to himself, as he walked along, humming some tune, about how the spirit of every sect came out, always alike, in the temperament, the very cut of the face, or whim of accent.  These descendants of the Covenanters, now,—­Presbyterian elders